


the courage of a fragile fighter

by justicarwrites



Category: The Originals (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Backstory, Character Study, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-11 00:26:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12311016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justicarwrites/pseuds/justicarwrites
Summary: Keelin's journey from being a beloved part of the Malraux pack to its sole surviving member, and the ways she learned how to cope with isolation.or: the one with a lone wolf finding her way home.





	the courage of a fragile fighter

**Author's Note:**

> This is almost entirely comprised of headcanons since the writers have refused to delve into Keelin's background beyond her love of coffee, and is just one of the ways I envision her history.
> 
> As always, let me know what you think! I'd love to hear feedback on the story, how it aligns with your imaginations of the what Keelin's life was like before she met Freya and how it differs.
> 
> Thanks for reading!

As pack animals by nature, the term “lone wolf” is an oxymoron, yet Keelin spent so much of her life as such that she grew incapable of thinking about one of those words without it being immediately joined by the other.

Most werewolves she encountered relished in the bonds formed by shared blood and shared land, finding a sense of purpose in the duty and responsibility one agrees to carry with the sheer act of being born into a pack. For most, the promise of constant companionship and the safety of an entire community dedicated to caring and protecting them was enough to conform to tradition and fall in line, loyalty a small price to pay for feeling as if one belongs to something bigger than oneself.

Perhaps if she hadn’t grown up in a culture that emphasized such close attachment to the pack, she wouldn’t have minded so much that she didn’t fit into hers.

Perhaps her resentment for the community she was born into wouldn’t have been so severe had they not all been volatile creatures, quick to anger and violence towards any they didn’t call their own, and sometimes even then.

Regardless of the finer details, Keelin spent her life building an association between being alone and being a werewolf, and that weight sat as heavy as lead encasing her heart because neither was a condition she had the power to change.

But things didn’t start out that way, and maybe the fact that Keelin _almost_ belonged made the reality of being an outsider all the more painful.

The territory they called home was a pocket of land between the Black and St. Francis rivers in southeastern Missouri, living apart from humans in an effort to preserve their cultural legacy and limit potential discovery by outsiders. Numbering upwards of ninety members when Keelin was born, the Malraux pack was one of the larger werewolf communities, many other bloodlines splintering as the genocide of their kind forced them into hiding.

Her easy-going and unabashed nature endeared her to elders of the pack and her peers alike; even as a child, if there was a social gathering in the community, Keelin was sure to be at the center of it. The brightest spots in her fondest of memories involved the euphoric sensation of a group’s shared laughter around a bonfire, the childlike joy of getting into trouble with her friends while skipping dull history lessons, and the warmth that spread through her chest during games of charades with her mom and siblings when she knew that there was nowhere else in the world she’d rather be.

They weren’t just her pack, they were her family.

And she was theirs.

Keelin was fifteen when she learned the price of membership.

At that time, it was customary for youth to be trained in combat from childhood. For many years she’d thought nothing of it, indulging in the tradition and learning how to defend herself without real consideration of why it was necessary. They lived in relative safety for many years, with their physical location remote enough that outsiders rarely stumbled upon their settlement without previous knowledge of where they were. She and all others her age were too young to remember when their pack was last threatened, knowing only through stories that her father had been the only casualty and his efforts that day stopped the attack.

On a personal level, danger felt too far away to comprehend.

The illusion of peace and safety was shattered the night their home was attacked by two vampires.

She never learned how they found them, and her memory of that night is a blur of adrenaline and her first real experience with fear. Most of what she remembers is being awoken by her brother, directed into the thick brush and ushered up a tree, urged to keep quiet. From her hiding place she could hear the rustling of leaves nearby where others lied in waiting, and the screams of those who weren’t lucky enough to make it out in time and those who felt honor bound to try to fend off the attackers.

They killed eleven members of the pack before they’d had their fill, or felt the effort to find the rest of them too great to bother with.

What she remembered most about the attack was everything that came after it.

For Keelin, the grief of the loss of those she’d grown up with and the anxiety that the vampires would someday return to finish the job were far overshadowed abhorrence of the vicious anger that sprang up in those around her in response to what happened.

When the remaining members of the clan regrouped, fights broke out almost instantly. Families of the victims lashed out at others for failing to defend their mothers, brothers, and children, blame was thrown left and right towards those who were supposed to be on patrol and those who ran for their lives instead of staying to fight a losing battle.

None such anger was like that of the pack’s alpha, Ryker, who beat the father of one of the lost wolves to the point of unconsciousness when he accused him of failing to fulfill his duty as their protector.

That next morning, before the bodies of the dead were cold, Ryker took every member of the pack over the age of eighteen that hadn’t yet triggered the curse on what he called a “hunting expedition”.

They all turned for the first time during the very next full moon.

It became pack custom for members to venture into one of the neighboring towns across the rivers the day they turned eighteen and find a vagrant or a petty criminal that no one would miss as a tool to trigger the curse. Ryker claimed these were sacrifices necessary to the preservation of their bloodline, to ensure that nothing like that attack would ever happen again. That they grew comfortable enough to have so many members that couldn’t access the true strength of their kind was a mistake that cost lives, and one he would not allow to be repeated.

If anyone questioned it internally, none did so publicly. Most rallied around this newfound solidarity and power, finding comfort in a solidified “us against the world” mentality in response to the tragedy and willing to do whatever necessary to make themselves feel safe on their own land again.

A necessary evil, they called it.

But Keelin couldn’t find it in herself to reconcile the scope of the evil enough to ever consider it necessary.

Where the rest of her pack was more unified than ever, Keelin was disillusioned by the wholescale acceptance of what was being done to the community outside of their own, and suddenly felt surrounded by strangers.

It was one thing to know that some people she grew up with had killed before; she mostly assumed that it only happened when someone impeded on their territory and threatened to harm them. It was entirely different to come face to face with the reality that all of them seemed willing to become at least complicit with murder.

Surely those she knew and loved, those she laughed and mourned with, those she was destined to spend her life surrounded by, would never stoop to a level so low.

In search of an answer that would settle her discontent so she could resume her previous position as a proud member of clan Malraux, she asked one of the elders what made these hunting expeditions any different than the vampire attack.

Word of the offense spread quickly.

Almost overnight, Keelin went from being the pack’s golden girl to a pariah.

For questioning the will of the alpha, for disrespecting the memory of the fallen, and for expressing disdain for their wolf forms, Keelin was ostracized.

Gone were the nights of staying up late enough to watch the Sun rise telling horror stories with her friends, the afternoons spent visiting with the matriarchs of the clan for reminders of what life was like during their former glory, the morning sparring sessions that always seemed to end in laughter.

What replaced them were unbearable and unending moments of quiet rejection that made her feel invisible.

When they loved her, her willingness to speak her mind was praised and deemed refreshing. After they began to resent her, that same quality was condemned and labelled as disloyalty to what they stood for.

Most of the time, the only people that would even speak to her were those in her immediate family and even then, interactions were laced with disappointment.

Her mom tried almost daily to convince her that she should apologize for the way she felt about the situation, doing her best to instill loyalty that transcended whatever independent moral code she maintained.

On one such occasion, Keelin asked, “what are we doing this for?” seeking answers that no one else was willing to provide.

Her mom responded without hesitation and an earnestness that implied that if her words didn’t make her understand, nothing could.

“Each other.”

Almost every day since, Keelin wished that answer was good enough for her.

There’s no loneliness like the sort that manifests as a dull ache that won’t fade. It’s a kind of haunting, an ever-present reminder of a life that did not start in a state of isolation.

As excruciating as it was, the longer she spent shunned for her convictions, the more certain she became that she was right for having them. Every day she spent waiting for someone to speak up and stand with her was another day they proved themselves cowards for refusing to resist against a toxic mob mentality. Every eighteenth birthday that rolled around provided another example of what she never wanted to become.

If seething rage, blind devotion, and cold-blooded murder were what it meant to be a werewolf, Keelin wanted no part of it.

The night before her eighteenth birthday, the night before people expected her to take someone’s life in order to turn herself into the monster that lie latent inside of her, Keelin left everything in the world she’d ever been familiar with, and she ran.

\----------

She had no plan other than to live as far removed from her life as a wolf as possible. She didn’t stop moving until crossed state lines into Arkansas, knowing anyone that might have followed her, if any even bothered at all, wouldn’t continue past the borders of their territory. Getting by on nothing more than her charm and natural intelligence, she crafted a version of herself that didn’t make her sick to her stomach.

Life was calm in a way she hadn’t experienced in years. Liberation came from the knowledge that no one knew who or what she was. For the first time, her future was her own. Keelin wasn’t forced to confront the evil potentials of her kind every day, her constant moral crisis subsiding with the ability to live in a state of denial over her past. She did her best to become a woman to whom the name “Malraux” meant nothing.

And it worked.

She got a waitressing job at a dive bar called Calico’s, and she made friends there that she _chose_. They didn’t know much about her and there was something akin to loneliness about that but it was a condition she accepted as necessary to live the life she wanted.

It worked.

She started taking classes, desiring a formal education, finally able to envision her future as something she alone could determine. She wanted to become a doctor. She was gonna save lives, and live by the words “do no harm” as if they were the only key to her salvation for being born a monster.

It worked.

She managed to master her heightened anger, developing tools to healthily suppress the toxic emotion that her people savored in. There was nothing about her that suggested she was anything other than human. She was free.

It worked.

It would have worked.

It almost worked.

But accidents happen.

Keelin was twenty when she killed a man and became everything she’d been running from for years.

In a single moment, during a night out with her girls, in an alleyway with a guy she was just tipsy enough to let lead her out the backdoor of the bar, the normal, human life she tried so hard to build collapsed around her.

It wasn’t on purpose. But the ground was just a little too slippery because it stopped raining half an hour before and he got a little too handsy for what she was feeling at the time and she had to push him a little too hard to get him to back off and before she could register what was happening he fell backwards, smashing his head against the pavement.

In a single moment she felt the weight of every wrong ever committed by her kind on her conscience, a sensation so acutely felt that it overwhelmed her body and cemented her to the ground.

She stared but couldn’t see, listened but couldn’t hear. All of her awareness centered on the nightmares she’d conjured of wolves ripping humans limb from limb, only instead of the forms of those she called family and friend, she saw herself.

In a single moment, the blame and the resentment and disgust she spent so much of her time directing towards her kind turned inwards. She wanted to crawl out of her body, certain it was the only way to experience true freedom from this _thing_ she was plagued with.

Pain shot through every cell in her body. She felt as if on fire. Her muscles clenched involuntarily and she fell to her knees, crying out so loud that it was a relief no one from the bar came out to check on her.

It was common knowledge that the transformation was an agony unparalleled by any other sensation. But no one ever told her that the act of triggering the curse alone would set her blood aflame.

Keelin was quietly grateful for the hurt, sure that it was some cosmic justice for taking a life. Killing someone _should hurt_. Robbing someone of however many days they had left _should hurt_. Creating a permanent absence in the lives of all those that loved a person _should hurt_.

Keelin hurt until she ran, and every day afterwards.

Getting home that night was a struggle, her newly heightened senses distorting the world as she knew it as she tried to adjust to the noise and the brightness of her surroundings. The sensations overwhelmed her, her skull threatening to split open.

Disoriented, she approached a payphone on the corner of her apartment building and called 9-1-1. She told them of a drunk man that slipped on concrete in an alleyway and fell unconscious when he hit his head, and it was almost the truth. They asked for her name and she hung up instead of giving it to them.

Reality blurred. Her mind numbed, and it was a welcome relief. She moved on autopilot the rest of the way to her apartment, her consciousness didn’t return until she found herself suddenly face to face with someone she almost recognized in the mirror.

Keelin’s eyes flashed yellow and black. Her reflection was shattered and her fist was bloodied and she’d never had an outburst like that before but it was enough to scare her.

Two years she spent living among humans and that was the first time she felt as if she could never belong in their world.

She thought of home with a deep longing in the pit of her stomach, as she hadn’t since before she left it. The desire to return crossed her mind, less of a fleeting fantasy than she would have liked. She ached for someone to tell her what happened next, to guide her through the steps forward, to reassure her that she wouldn’t be going through this alone.

When she left her pack, she never considered that there would come a time she regretted her decision.

There’s no loneliness like the sort that comes with life-altering moments spent without anyone near that understands.

She wanted to go back for the solidarity in transformation and the soothing words that could be offered from those that knew what it was like because they’d done it a hundred times over.

She wanted to go back because they could potentially be the only people that could teach her how to do this without becoming the bloodthirsty animal nightmares were made of, including her own.

She wanted to go back despite knowing she would not be welcome.

She wanted to go back so much so that she almost forgot all the reasons she left in the first place.

Almost.

Keelin packed her things and skipped town before she could learn that the death of the man in the alleyway had officially been ruled an accident, headed in the exact opposite direction of the home she longed for.

\----------

With the threat of the full moon ever-looming, and without the assistance of anyone that knew of her condition, Keelin had to be clever. She had to start over, adapting new tactics of suppressing what she was, new methods of ensuring she wasn’t a danger.

She lived in a state of constant motion, never knowing a place or its people long before leaving.

With what money she had, she rented storage lockers or garages in whatever towns she happened to be passing through during a full moon, barring herself inside with padlocks and shackles she brought with her everywhere, and paying her temporary landlords extra if they’d let the cries and growls from within go without question.

On days she wasn’t traveling or preparing for a full moon, she worked odd jobs doing whatever people were willing to pay her for and tried to build enough rapport with the locals she encountered to avoid headlines about a mysterious curly-haired woman from out of town being run out with torches and pitchforks.

When not otherwise occupied, she spent what time she had in libraries all across the country, reading through whatever biology textbooks and medical journals she could get her hands on. Her dreams of becoming a doctor felt more distant than ever, but still she held onto the hope of someday helping people in a way that mattered as if it were her sole lifeline.

In many ways, it was.

Without any real sense of purpose, belonging nowhere and knowing no one, Keelin was lost in almost every sense of the word.

Her life was monotonous despite her ever-changing surroundings, her months operating on an endless cycle of resentment and frustration over the lack of control.

One day, for no reason other than it happened to be the last stop on her bus, she found herself in a small suburb east of Austin, Texas. Her intent was never to stay, but there was a quality about that place she found endearing. It was the kind of town expectant parents went to raise their children away from the city, the kind of town that rebellious teenagers waxed poetic about someday escaping, the kind of town that people went to get stuck. Its foundation was solid and everything about it was remarkably average. It wasn’t her own but it was the exact kind of place Keelin wanted desperately to fit into after years of living without any semblance of stability.

Still, the plan was only to stay for a month, a single full moon. But one turned into two, and then three. Four months and Keelin decided to get a real job to save money for when she’d eventually depart. Five, six months and she realized that the people there got the closest anyone came to knowing her since she triggered her curse. Seven months in and she struck a one-year rental agreement on a tiny shack at the edge of town that came complete with an underground tornado shelter perfect for riding out the full moon. After ten months, she enrolled part time at the community college just down the main highway.

By the time she finally committed to leaving, she was three years older, possessed a degree in biochemistry and an acceptance letter to a top tier medical school not too far away, and gotten through enough full moons that she began to remember what it was like being in her wolf form.

Her departure marked the first time she’d ever said goodbye.

\-----------------

Medical school provided new challenges and repackaged many old ones.

She had trouble getting people to take her seriously. The large gaps in her education, the questionable reputability of her previous schools, and her age relative to the other first year med students were all used by the faculty and her peers alike as justification to underestimate her. It was infuriating, but there was a certain indescribable satisfaction attached to proving people wrong, repeatedly. It wasn’t until the end of her second year that she was finally recognized as an indispensable talent worthy of respect.

But being on the radar of others, standing out in any capacity, was dangerous for her. People who viewed her as competition questioned her origins incessantly, striving towards some hint at what made her tick as a means to exploit what weaknesses came attached to it. Answers about what she was wasn’t what people were after, but Keelin grew more anxious that she’d be discovered the more inquiries into her history were made. That anxiousness made her restless. She fought against every instinct to run, packing her bags before promptly unpacking them on numerous occasions, only just managing to convince herself that she’d come too far to halt her own progress now.

Life wasn’t perfect, and she carried on.

Keelin’s relationship with herself remained as complex as ever.

She was proud of where she was and all she accomplished despite her beginnings, never more so than the day she earned her MD and relocated to a teaching hospital in Austin to complete her residency. If there was one thing she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was that she did it all on her own.

But complementary feelings of shame followed her wherever she went. She began to perceive her nature as an illness she craved a cure for, going as far as illicitly engineering a daily regimen that suppressed her accelerated healing when a woman she dated got close to realizing she was different.

It was easier to go to extreme lengths to deny who she was than it would have been to let anyone know her, let alone come to terms with and accept all she’d spent her life rejecting.

That experience with the orthopedic surgeon was unfortunately reminiscent of the way all her relationships played out. As welcome as the temporary comforts of intimacy and companionship were, her connections were fleeting because she found herself unable to properly commit herself to them. Her longest relationship lasted seven months and ended when he asked her why she seemed to drop off the face of the Earth every so often.

The lesson she learned in her string of almosts with the men and women that could have known her if she let them was a hard pill to swallow. But loving someone is near impossible when you can’t trust them with who you are, and that was a reality she couldn’t change.

There’s no loneliness like the sort that results from meeting many but knowing none, a cruel consequence of the fact that being 100% herself was both a danger and a source of shame.

Those feelings of isolation grew the closer she became to finishing her residency, finding that too many big moments in her life flew by without having anyone to share them with. She found herself wondering more frequently if her family would be able to let go the years of estrangement enough to be proud of her for all that she’d done since leaving them.

Maybe it was nostalgia, a simple case of looking back at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but as time went on since her departure, as she experienced more of the world, she wanted to try for reconciliation.

Part of her felt foolish for that. After all, they were the ones to turn their backs first. They were the ones that all but forced her out. They were the ones who first introduced her to the concept of being alone. Keelin knew all of that, knew it all in a way so deeply that reminders of those facts followed her like the moon. She should have been angry− vengeful, even.

But she never was very good with either of those emotions.

And she always was the one willing to try for change.

For better or worse, she needed to see for herself if the bonds with her people were too far gone.

Going on fifteen years after she ran from her pack, certain that she would never even consider looking back, Keelin decided to visit the first place she called home. She took a week off, and made her way back to a pocket of land between the Black and St. Francis rivers in southeastern Missouri, to a community set apart from human outsiders.

Keelin set out to find her family, seeking catharsis in settling old disputes and traumas one way or another.

Keelin set out to find her family, retracing the steps she used to flee as if she’d only been gone an hour.

Keelin set out to find her family, fantasizing the whole way there about what she hoped would happen like a giddy child before their birthday.

Keelin set out to find her family, and what she found in their place were rotting corpses.

Bullet casings littered the clearing. Remnants of a bonfire still lie at its center. She couldn’t be sure if the bodies were there long or if the local wildlife picking apart the remains accelerated their decomposition. If not for the location, she could almost have let herself believe it wasn’t her pack’s men, women, and children.

She didn’t want to sift through the visible remains to see if she could recognize anyone, knowing as soon as she saw the scene that their dead would not have been left like this if any at all survived.

Standing there, staring blankly at the sight before her, a heavy sensation that can only be described as numbness set in. Her form became firmly planted to the land, feeling indistinguishable from the trees that surrounded her. Eternities passed by in what was only minutes. Every cell in her body was tasked to watch over all that remained of her people, witnessing their return to the Earth and the disappearance of any indication that they had ever been there at all.

These were not the body of a barely-dead man whose life she took but name she never learned. These were not the cadavers she worked with in med school while trying to master the anatomy and physiology of the people she wanted to save. These were not the strangers she watched die because they were already too far gone by the time they’d come into the emergency room she assisted in during her residency.

These were all that was left of the people she spent the beginnings of her life loving and being loved by. All that was left of the mother that tried to bring her back from the margins of their community, of the friends she was born next to, of the community leaders that told her being part of this land and this people made her important.

These were the people she always secretly hoped would be waiting for her whenever she decided to come home.

She never even said goodbye. Guilt threatened to cut her down at the knees.

She was too late. Her lungs held more burning regret than they did air.

She failed them. The realization that she would have done unspeakable things if it meant getting a fighting chance to save them hit her like a brick wall.

Keelin was sole surviving member of the Malraux pack, a once proud people now reduced to one who never fulfilled the requirements of membership. That was a sort of loneliness that seeped into her bloodstream, pumping through her veins and present through every aspect of her existence from that moment forward.

There were no answers to be found in the destruction before her, no motivation she could make sense of. Werewolves could have stood a chance against a vampire attack, where both were armed with nothing more than their natural strengths, reflexes, and weapons. But machine guns?

The mechanical element made it impersonal. Routine, even.

She didn’t learn until much later of a vile creature named Lucien and his secondhand slaughter of werewolves across the country that manifested only as a convenient, auxiliary goal to his quest for the venom of all seven packs, and that the destruction of her family resulted from nothing more than a feud between ancient vampires.

After standing there long enough for the sight to be permanently branded onto her memory, she turned around and she walked away.

She walked until she reached the closest highway, and then further to a callbox a mile up. She called 9-1-1 and told them that she stumbled upon evidence of the slaughter of a peaceful but scared community that lived apart from other people on a plot of land between the Black and St. Francis rivers, and it was almost the truth. They asked for her name, and she hung up instead of giving it to them.

Keelin boarded a bus back to Austin that same night, and she did her best to carry on, telling herself that everything she saw was the final chapter on a book she needed to close.

\----------

When she returned to her life, she went the rest of her residency without giving anyone any indication that something was off. Her mask of normalcy was so carefully constructed that she almost began believing in it herself. Be it not for the monthly reminder of what she truly was behind all she pretended to be, she may have eventually succeeded in forgetting that life entirely.

It definitely wasn’t the healthiest move she ever made, but she managed to convince herself that it was the practical one. Trying to talk to anyone about what happened would only lead to questions she either didn’t have the answers to or wasn’t willing to divulge, so she stayed silent in her mourning. Acknowledging that she had complex feelings about the death of her family that involved a lot of anger and grief over people she hadn’t spoken to in a decade and a half could only result in further dwelling on a past that she couldn’t change.

She wanted to move on because the future before her was everything she worked towards for years and she didn’t want to risk losing it all for the sake of nursing old wounds.

She wanted to move on because motion was what she was good at and staying still involved giving herself the time to process things she didn’t want to accept.

She wanted to move on because it seemed the only way to make her survival mean something.

And so she did.

She did.

She tried.

Most of it was easy. She didn’t have to fake the excitement or the pride at officially becoming a doctor, specializing in assessing the condition of emergency room trauma patients and maintaining their vitals until a surgeon was available. She didn’t have to fake affection for the friends that did their very best to be what she needed.

But she did have to pretend that those things were enough for her.

Luckily, it was a part she played well, slipping into the role of the fulfilled woman with the world at her fingertips and all she ever could have asked for in terms of her career and the people surrounding her. It was simple to act, for all but one night a month, as if she had nothing to hide and wore her heart on her sleeve and wasn’t suffering from the realization that being alone was the only real constant she’d ever experienced.

She played the part of the woman she wanted to be so well that she almost became her.

Then Keelin met Freya Mikaelson, and she was ripped apart at the seams.

\----------

Their connection wasn’t immediate, but it transcended understanding, time, better judgment, and anything she’d ever experienced.

With Freya, there was no more pretending, about anything. Freya saw her and it felt like the first time being recognized, she heard her in a way she was never before heard, and touched her in a way that made her understand why souls need physical forms.

It took two real conversations for her to hone in on Keelin’s deepest desires. That someone could know her with such ease was as terrifying as it was exciting in the newness of the experience, and she suspected those feelings went both ways.

They had unspoken similarities in their experiences with familial obligation, running, isolation, and abandonment. Quiet compassion was restorative, but the safety that came in speaking with the knowledge that she wouldn’t be judged or condemned was outright liberating. It was the first time that she didn’t have to hide what she was, where she came from, or what happened to her people. She spoke about aspects of her life that she swore she’d take with her to the grave, and with each secret spilled she felt the weight that accumulated for years on her heart gradually lighten.

Keelin understood Freya’s distrust of strangers and her fear of discovery that came with fleeing from the hauntings of the past. She understood the way her loneliness became a tool to keep herself and those who might get too close safe. She understood how most of the time, ignoring the feelings she didn’t want to confront seemed the best way to get them to go away.

Accepting Freya’s faults and loving her in her entirety paved the way to forgiving herself for the parts of her that she couldn’t change.

Their relationship was one of deconstructing what they thought they knew of themselves, looking at even the pieces they were most ashamed of without denunciation, and finally building themselves back up into something better than before.

When they were together, they were growing.

The moment Keelin knew she was never going to stop growing with Freya came at the tail end of one of her hardest days since meeting her.

It was the last Friday before Mardi Gras, and the streets were packed full of Carnival-goers whose celebration of nothing in particular would last until well into the following week. She intended to join them when she got home, but what took place during her shift eliminated her desire to do any partying.

Instead, she ascended the stairs of the compound and immediately strode towards the balcony, hoping to get a glimpse at the stars that were one of two sources of comfort during times like these.

The night was completely overcast and she suspected the brightness of the street below wouldn’t have granted much visibility of the cosmos even if it wasn’t.

She almost gave up her attempts to pretend to see the worlds above her when the voice of her other comfort rose up behind her.

“There you are,” Freya’s voice always took on this lilt when greeting her that was entirely unexpected and absolutely endearing considering its normal roughness; it was a little thing but it put a smile on her face and warmth in her chest even in the moments she thought it impossible.

She approached the railing and leaned beside her, lowering her gaze to catch her eye before gesturing towards the sky, “convening with the stars?”

“Trying to. Doesn’t seem like they’re taking calls right now though.”

She let out a quiet “hm” before closing her eyes and whispering the words of a spell into the night.

The skies seemed to clear above them, and Keelin couldn’t suppress the laugh of wonder that escaped her lips. “You know, I don’t have much experience with the whole ‘magic’ thing, but controlling the weather has got to be up there on the list of badass things someone can do.”

“That was not a weather spell. Those take hours and a blood sacrifice or two to complete properly.”

Her deadpan made it impossible to tell if she was joking, but she couldn’t hold off the smile tugging at the edge of her lips and Keelin rolled her eyes at the other woman’s fondness of such dark humor.

“This is just something that can show you what’s already there.”

Keelin looked out towards the stars once more and relished in the vastness of what she found there.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She didn’t, but she knew she should. Without moving her eyes from the horizon, she said plainly, “I lost a patient today.”

Freya’s reaction was subtle but instant, orienting herself closer and standing almost protectively beside her while reaching to intertwine their fingers.

“He was just a kid, too. Couldn’t have been older than fourteen,” her voice wavered and Freya squeezed her hand. “He got hit by a party bus headed into the city and was caught under one of the wheels for two and a half miles.” She dropped her eyes towards the festivities going on below.

“How’d he survive long enough to get to the ER?”

She inhaled deeply before turning towards her to speak, knowing that the words were bound to steal the air from her lungs. “He was a werewolf. They hit him while he was turned because of the full moon last night.”

She filled in the details without letting Freya ask for them.

“When we turn, most of the bones in our body break to take on the shape of a wolf. It sucks but when it’s over, we heal almost good as new. When we’re hurt as badly as he was, though, it all takes longer. The body doesn’t know which to address first, the normal trauma of turning or the trauma we sustained during the full moon. Our normal rate of cell regeneration is slowed because there’s so much that needs to be rebuilt. His bones were still fractured from the transition when they brought him in. Others probably would have written the breaks off as more injuries from the crash, but…”

“You could tell the difference.”

She nodded, “for a while I was kind of obsessed with looking at my body from a medical perspective, immediately before and after I turned. X-Rays, CT scans, blood tests, you name it, all trying to track patterns, find something predictable that I could use to develop some sort of cure, or at the very least make it hurt a little less.”

She toyed absentmindedly with the band of her moonlight ring before speaking again, “‘course none of it worked, but… it made it easy to recognize what we look like internally after the full moon. He was a wolf. I’m sure of it.”

Freya rested her other hand on the small of her back and rubbed tiny, soothing circles with her thumb.

“I kept telling myself that if I could just keep him alive until he started to heal, he’d be home free, and his chances were good for a while. He was responding to the antibiotics I issued and his vitals were stable for an hour or so, the bleeding slowed as his blood clotted.”

She laughed without humor like her body was trying to physically counteract the grief it was experiencing, “I was actually trying to think up a reasonable explanation to give about why a boy who looked so banged up when the hikers found him that they almost didn’t bother calling 9-1-1 was soon to be in better health than an average college student that wasn’t ‘I’m _that_ good’ when his heartrate dropped and we couldn’t get it back up.”

Keelin wiped the tears roughly from her eyes before they had the chance to fall.

 “I lost him.”

The loneliness of a doctor was a kind she never expected. The level of responsibility in being handed someone’s entire existence and told “save this” was overwhelming at times, never more so than when she failed.

“The worst part is that now he lies in a morgue with no name and no one to mourn him, and I doubt someone will come to claim his body before he gets cremated and put in a tomb with all of the other people who died without anyone there rooting for them.”

“He had you.”

“Yeah, and look how far that got him.”

“Hey, come on,” Freya protested to the implicit self-deprecation in her words. “Keelin…”

She was pliant when Freya turned her body to face her, too focused on choking out the root of her self-doubt and trying to hide the now-steady stream of tears falling down her cheeks, “what good am I if I can’t even save one of my own?”

Freya pulled her into her arms without hesitation and before she’d gotten all the words out.

She pressed her face against the woman’s shoulder, clutched tightly at the back of her shirt, and let herself be held together tightly as the trembling threatened to shatter her into pieces.

The question was rhetorical but Freya answered it anyway, “the best.”

Keelin wasn’t even sure what she meant by “one of my own”. She couldn’t discern if how hard she was taking this was about the fact that he was a werewolf, that he was yet another werewolf she couldn’t save, or that he was one as alone as she once was, and died before he got the chance to know anything better.

She didn’t know how long it took before she calmed enough to stop shaking. When she did, it was more out of exhaustion than a quieted heart.

Freya pulled back just far enough to meet her eyes. She lifted her hands to brush the remaining tears away from her face before she spoke. “Listen… I want you to keep something in mind for me.”

Her eyes bounced between Keelin’s and the ground and she saw the gears turning in her head, trying to choose her words well enough to convey what she meant in a way that mattered. Finally settling on something, she leveled her gaze.

She gestured vaguely at the sky above them and then brought her hand down to cup the back of Keelin’s neck.

“Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there. Even when you forget it, or doubt it, some things stay with you. Your skill, your desire to make a difference… it’s all a part of _you_ , Keelin. Mistakes… weak moments… losses, none of it changes what you carry with you.”

She had to consider the words before she let them bring her comfort.

For most of her life, Keelin worried that she would never escape the weight the choices of her family had on her conscience, scared that those evils would follow her until the day she died. Her greatest fear was that decisions she didn’t make would define the person that she was, and never considered that the choices she did make spoke more truth about her character.

It was a simple reframing of everything she already knew, a fresh perspective on an existence she spent years examining.

And it made all the difference.

It took time, but that moment laid the foundation for her realization that she worked so hard to make her own life because of who she was, and not because of what she was afraid to be.

“I’m proud of you.”

The words brought her back into the moment and she felt immediately lighter.

Keelin thought again of the concept that certain things become an integral part of who someone is, and that those parts remain even in their darkest moments. She looked into green eyes that seemed like oceans in the depth of affection they contained, felt the way she was being held as if she were something precious, and she knew that it was true.

“Anyone ever tell you that you’re kind of perfect?”

“It’s come up once or twice.”

She was relished in a bond formed by choice and understanding, finding purpose in the recognition that there were forces that transcended where one comes from and who they’re born to. For her, the promise of constant companionship and the safety of being truly known was enough to inspire her to become something bigger than what she ever could have imagined for herself alone.

They shared a smile, a kiss, a life.

It was enough to make all the time spent being a lone wolf seem but a second in a lifetime of knowing that “home” and “her” were the only two words that carried an unbreakable bond.

**Author's Note:**

> find me @maggiesawyer on tumblr or @freyamikaclson on twitter


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